Important
This documentation covers IPython versions 6.0 and higher. Beginning with version 6.0, IPython stopped supporting compatibility with Python versions lower than 3.3 including all versions of Python 2.7.
If you are looking for an IPython version compatible with Python 2.7, please use the IPython 5.x LTS release and refer to its documentation (LTS is the long term support release).
0.9 series
Release 0.9.1
This release was quickly made to restore compatibility with Python 2.4, which version 0.9 accidentally broke. No new features were introduced, other than some additional testing support for internal use.
Release 0.9
New features
All furl files and security certificates are now put in a read-only directory named ~/.ipython/security.
A single function
get_ipython_dir()
, inIPython.genutils
that determines the user’s IPython directory in a robust manner.Laurent’s WX application has been given a top-level script called ipython-wx, and it has received numerous fixes. We expect this code to be architecturally better integrated with Gael’s WX ‘ipython widget’ over the next few releases.
The Editor synchronization work by Vivian De Smedt has been merged in. This code adds a number of new editor hooks to synchronize with editors under Windows.
A new, still experimental but highly functional, WX shell by Gael Varoquaux. This work was sponsored by Enthought, and while it’s still very new, it is based on a more cleanly organized architecture of the various IPython components. We will continue to develop this over the next few releases as a model for GUI components that use IPython.
Another GUI frontend, Cocoa based (Cocoa is the OSX native GUI framework), authored by Barry Wark. Currently the WX and the Cocoa ones have slightly different internal organizations, but the whole team is working on finding what the right abstraction points are for a unified codebase.
As part of the frontend work, Barry Wark also implemented an experimental event notification system that various ipython components can use. In the next release the implications and use patterns of this system regarding the various GUI options will be worked out.
IPython finally has a full test system, that can test docstrings with IPython-specific functionality. There are still a few pieces missing for it to be widely accessible to all users (so they can run the test suite at any time and report problems), but it now works for the developers. We are working hard on continuing to improve it, as this was probably IPython’s major Achilles heel (the lack of proper test coverage made it effectively impossible to do large-scale refactoring). The full test suite can now be run using the iptest command line program.
The notion of a task has been completely reworked. An
ITask
interface has been created. This interface defines the methods that tasks need to implement. These methods are now responsible for things like submitting tasks and processing results. There are two basic task types:IPython.kernel.task.StringTask
(this is the oldTask
object, but renamed) and the newIPython.kernel.task.MapTask
, which is based on a function.A new interface,
IPython.kernel.mapper.IMapper
has been defined to standardize the idea of amap
method. This interface has a singlemap
method that has the same syntax as the built-inmap
. We have also defined amapper
factory interface that creates objects that implementIPython.kernel.mapper.IMapper
for different controllers. Both the multiengine and task controller now have mapping capabilities.The parallel function capabilities have been reworks. The major changes are that i) there is now an
@parallel
magic that creates parallel functions, ii) the syntax for multiple variable follows that ofmap
, iii) both the multiengine and task controller now have a parallel function implementation.All of the parallel computing capabilities from
ipython1-dev
have been merged into IPython proper. This resulted in the following new subpackages:IPython.kernel
,IPython.kernel.core
,traitlets.config
,IPython.tools
andIPython.testing
.As part of merging in the
ipython1-dev
stuff, thesetup.py
script and friends have been completely refactored. Now we are checking for dependencies using the approach that matplotlib uses.The documentation has been completely reorganized to accept the documentation from
ipython1-dev
.We have switched to using Foolscap for all of our network protocols in
IPython.kernel
. This gives us secure connections that are both encrypted and authenticated.We have a brand new
COPYING.txt
files that describes the IPython license and copyright. The biggest change is that we are putting “The IPython Development Team” as the copyright holder. We give more details about exactly what this means in this file. All developer should read this and use the new banner in all IPython source code files.sh profile: ./foo runs foo as system command, no need to do !./foo anymore
String lists now support
sort(field, nums = True)
method (to easily sort system command output). Try it witha = !ls -l ; a.sort(1, nums=1)
.‘%cpaste foo’ now assigns the pasted block as string list, instead of string
The ipcluster script now run by default with no security. This is done because the main usage of the script is for starting things on localhost. Eventually when ipcluster is able to start things on other hosts, we will put security back.
‘cd –foo’ searches directory history for string foo, and jumps to that dir. Last part of dir name is checked first. If no matches for that are found, look at the whole path.
Bug fixes
The Windows installer has been fixed. Now all IPython scripts have
.bat
versions created. Also, the Start Menu shortcuts have been updated.The colors escapes in the multiengine client are now turned off on win32 as they don’t print correctly.
The
IPython.kernel.scripts.ipengine
script was exec’ing mpi_import_statement incorrectly, which was leading the engine to crash when mpi was enabled.A few subpackages had missing
__init__.py
files.The documentation is only created if Sphinx is found. Previously, the
setup.py
script would fail if it was missing.Greedy
cd
completion has been disabled again (it was enabled in 0.8.4) as it caused problems on certain platforms.
Backwards incompatible changes
The
clusterfile
options of the ipcluster command has been removed as it was not working and it will be replaced soon by something much more robust.The
IPython.kernel
configuration now properly find the user’s IPython directory.In ipapi, the
make_user_ns()
function has been replaced withmake_user_namespaces()
, to support dict subclasses in namespace creation.IPython.kernel.client.Task
has been renamedIPython.kernel.client.StringTask
to make way for new task types.The keyword argument
style
has been renameddist
inscatter
,gather
andmap
.Renamed the values that the rename
dist
keyword argument can have from'basic'
to'b'
.IPython has a larger set of dependencies if you want all of its capabilities. See the
setup.py
script for details.The constructors for
IPython.kernel.client.MultiEngineClient
andIPython.kernel.client.TaskClient
no longer take the (ip,port) tuple. Instead they take the filename of a file that contains the FURL for that client. If the FURL file is in your IPYTHONDIR, it will be found automatically and the constructor can be left empty.The asynchronous clients in
IPython.kernel.asyncclient
are now created using the factory functionsget_multiengine_client()
andget_task_client()
. These return aDeferred
to the actual client.The command line options to
ipcontroller
andipengine
have changed to reflect the new Foolscap network protocol and the FURL files. Please see the help for these scripts for details.The configuration files for the kernel have changed because of the Foolscap stuff. If you were using custom config files before, you should delete them and regenerate new ones.
Changes merged in from IPython1
New features
Much improved
setup.py
andsetupegg.py
scripts. Because Twisted and zope.interface are now easy installable, we can declare them as dependencies in our setupegg.py script.IPython is now compatible with Twisted 2.5.0 and 8.x.
Added a new example of how to use
ipython1.kernel.asynclient
.Initial draft of a process daemon in
ipython1.daemon
. This has not been merged into IPython and is still inipython1-dev
.The
TaskController
now has methods for getting the queue status.The
TaskResult
objects not have information about how long the task took to run.We are attaching additional attributes to exceptions
(_ipython_*)
that we use to carry additional info around.New top-level module
asyncclient
that has asynchronous versions (that return deferreds) of the client classes. This is designed to users who want to run their own Twisted reactor.All the clients in
client
are now based on Twisted. This is done by running the Twisted reactor in a separate thread and using theblockingCallFromThread()
function that is in recent versions of Twisted.Functions can now be pushed/pulled to/from engines using
MultiEngineClient.push_function()
andMultiEngineClient.pull_function()
.Gather/scatter are now implemented in the client to reduce the work load of the controller and improve performance.
Complete rewrite of the IPython documentation. All of the documentation from the IPython website has been moved into docs/source as restructured text documents. PDF and HTML documentation are being generated using Sphinx.
New developer oriented documentation: development guidelines and roadmap.
Traditional
ChangeLog
has been changed to a more usefulchanges.txt
file that is organized by release and is meant to provide something more relevant for users.
Bug fixes
Created a proper
MANIFEST.in
file to create source distributions.Fixed a bug in the
MultiEngine
interface. Previously, multi-engine actions were being collected with aDeferredList
withfireononeerrback=1
. This meant that methods were returning before all engines had given their results. This was causing extremely odd bugs in certain cases. To fix this problem, we have 1) setfireononeerrback=0
to make sure all results (or exceptions) are in before returning and 2) introduced aCompositeError
exception that wraps all of the engine exceptions. This is a huge change as it means that users will have to catchCompositeError
rather than the actual exception.
Backwards incompatible changes
All names have been renamed to conform to the lowercase_with_underscore convention. This will require users to change references to all names like
queueStatus
toqueue_status
.Previously, methods like
MultiEngineClient.push()
andMultiEngineClient.push()
used*args
and**kwargs
. This was becoming a problem as we weren’t able to introduce new keyword arguments into the API. Now these methods simple take a dict or sequence. This has also allowed us to get rid of the*All
methods likepushAll()
andpullAll()
. These things are now handled with thetargets
keyword argument that defaults to'all'
.The
MultiEngineClient.magicTargets
has been renamed toMultiEngineClient.targets
.All methods in the MultiEngine interface now accept the optional keyword argument
block
.Renamed
RemoteController
toMultiEngineClient
andTaskController
toTaskClient
.Renamed the top-level module from
api
toclient
.Most methods in the multiengine interface now raise a
CompositeError
exception that wraps the user’s exceptions, rather than just raising the raw user’s exception.Changed the
setupNS
andresultNames
in theTask
class topush
andpull
.